The South Asia Politics, News, and Analysis Thread

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Fatima Faizi

BAZARAK, Afghanistan — His face juts alongside the single-lane roads carved into the remote and forbidding Panjshir Valley, and looms over twisted hulks of Soviet tanks and the patchwork of cornfields. Seemingly everywhere, billboards carry the image of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the admired and assassinated military commander from this region, and quotes that testify to Panjshir’s pride and willingness to go it alone. One reads: “Dependency is a disgrace.”

The Panjshiris, who are known for holding off the Soviets in the 1980s, protecting their remote and forbidding valley from the Taliban in the 1990s and helping lead the opening salvos of the U.S. invasion in 2001, find themselves once again drawn toward defiance. This time, the struggle is against the national leadership in Kabul, despite Panjshir’s ties to the capital through both money and power.

As the Afghan government conducts peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar, one of the main concerns has been over how fractured their side is, leading many to question whether government negotiators can truly speak for much of a country that is torn by political discord and lack of faith in the system.

The restiveness in Panjshir, where many are outraged by the effort to make peace with the Taliban, is raising fears that the province and other regions might take up arms and try to force more autonomy for themselves, in an echo of the early days of Afghanistan’s warlord era. Some factions are openly calling to re-establish the Northern Alliance, the armed coalition that helped the United States topple the Taliban in 2001.

There are also growing concerns that as they did in the past, Panjshir and other breakaway places will more actively court regional actors like Russia, India and Iran for cash if the government in Kabul appears to weaken further.

Panjshiris “don’t see themselves in the government anymore,” Mohammad Amin Sediqi, the deputy governor of Panjshir, said from his desk in Bazarak, the provincial capital. “We fought for a better Afghanistan, and now we’re stepping back and watching history repeat itself,” he added, a reference to Afghanistan’s fracturing and the bloody civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

The people of Panjshir, who are mostly of the ethnic Tajik minority, simply “don’t trust the government anymore,” said Mohammad Alam Izedyar, the deputy head of the upper house of Parliament who represents Panjshir. “The government isn’t going to resist for long and be able to defend its people.”

These sentiments came to a head in Panjshir late last month, after a failed government operation to arrest the powerful former chairman of Afghanistan’s soccer federation, Keramuddin Keram. He also used to be governor of Panjshir, and still claims many loyalists there.

Mr. Keram faces criminal charges of sexual abuse of female players, many of whom come forward with harrowing accusations of being assaulted and threatened by him. He has denied the accusations. The Afghan attorney general’s office issued an arrest warrant last year for Mr. Keram, who was banned from soccer for life by the sport’s global governing body, FIFA, and fined about $1 million.

In Panjshir, Mr. Sediqi tried said the national government in Kabul refused to coordinate with the Panjshir authorities. Panjshiri officials have yet to hand Mr. Keram to the Kabul authorities, though local community members have pushed for them to do so.

Weeks after the botched arrest attempt, Mr. Keram addressed a crowd in Panjshir, breaking months of silence to deny the charges leveled by the government against him.

“I am not fugitive, nor a criminal,” Mr. Keram said. He added that ordering his arrest from Kabul was the equivalent of sending “thieves to someone’s home.”

Panjshir is not the only region that is simmering. Other powerful regional figures have increasingly bridled at the administration of President Ashraf Ghani, and clashes between federal and local officials have at times tipped over into violence.

“There is a double standard in the government,” said Rahela Ataee, a provincial council member in Panjshir. Ms. Ataee pointed to the effort to arrest Mr. Keram and the resources needed for federal officials to enter Panjshir to conduct the raid. She claimed that there was no proof of Mr. Keram’s wrongdoing.

“Our government should be decentralized,” Ms. Ataee said. “It would be better if we could decide our own future.”

There is a contradiction in Panjshiris’ restiveness, though. Although they say the national government does not represent them, they have for years made up a large slice of Afghanistan’s political and security elite. One Panjshiri figure, Amrullah Saleh, who worked alongside Ahmad Shah Massoud through the civil war years, is the country’s first vice president, for example.

Panjshiri leaders were key pillars in the creation of the Afghan government after the Taliban’s withdrawal in 2002. Former Vice President Muhammad Qasim Fahim, was born in Panjshir and led the Northern Alliance, a group of militias welded together to resist the Taliban after Mr. Massoud’s assassination just two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Mr. Fahim was considered the foremost leader of the country’s Tajiks and helped rally the northern provinces behind then-President Hamid Karzai in the war’s early years. He calmed tensions between the minority ethnic groups and political figures from the country’s Pashtun majority. Mr. Fahim, who faced accusations of human rights abuses and corruption, died in 2014 of a heart attack, and many among the northern provinces felt that they had lost one of their staunchest supporters.

Mr. Saleh, the first vice president, is today considered suspect by some Panjshiris because of his prominent role in President Ghani’s administration. Mr. Saleh openly criticized Mr. Ghani in his first term, then ran alongside him as his vice president for the second term; some Panjshiris have accused him of caving in to Mr. Ghani in return for power.

But while Panjshiri leadership is comfortable, for now, with critiquing the Kabul government from afar and protecting Mr. Keram, Shamsudin Hamid, 57, a former fighter who fought under Mr. Massoud in both the Soviet-Afghan war and the civil war, has other plans.

In his office in a government-funded education center in Bazarak, a gray Czech-pistol strapped to his hip, Mr. Hamid outlined a renewed effort to bring back the Northern Alliance. It will be led, he said, by Mr. Massoud’s protégés, including Mr. Massoud’s son, Ahmad Massoud, a 31-year-old who earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in London and has little military experience.

Mr. Hamid has lived well, like many of his compatriots who became warlords during the civil war and after the American-led invasion. Mr. Hamid sent five of his daughters to university and landed a well-paid government job as the head of Panjshir’s teacher training center.

Still, he says his generation will lead the renewal of the Northern Alliance, also known as the United Front. The calls for the return of independent militias have drawn public condemnation from officials in Kabul, though some privately believe their return could serve some purpose in the months to come.

“We’re the second generation,” Mr. Hamid said. “There are thousands of people who want to reform the United Front.”

Frustration has often simmered in the north, but it has seldom been given as much fuel as it is getting now, as the government and other Afghan factions negotiate with the Taliban in Qatar in a process that could lead to a power-sharing government with the insurgency.

Mr. Hamid and other Panjshiri figures accuse the United States of abandoning the country to the same forces they fought a generation ago, and vow they will not go without a new fight.

“This peace process is an American project,” Mr. Hamid said. “The Americans want the Taliban to come back to the country. But we are going to fight them. We won’t sacrifice the last 19 years of progress — that is nonnegotiable.”

On October 27, the Ministry of Home Affairs had notified new land laws for Jammu and Kashmir. The amended laws allow any Indian citizen to buy land in the region, sparking fears among locals as it was earlier meant only for permanent residents under Article 370 of the Constitution. The Centre’s notification stated that the term “being permanent resident of the state” as a criteria has been “omitted”.

Shops, petrol pumps, and other businesses were shut in Srinagar, an unidentified official said. Public transport also largely remained off the roads, but private cars and auto-rickshaws were plying in certain areas.

Security personnel were stationed in large numbers in vulnerable areas of Srinagar and across the Valley. A shutdown was observed in north Kashmir’s Sopore, Kupwara, Handwara, Bandipore, and other areas, reported The Indian Express. In south Kashmir, Anantnag, Pulwama, Kulgam, and Pampore were among the areas that were observing shutdown.

On Wednesday, the Hurriyat had issued a call for the shutdown. It said that the laws are being amended and “thrust upon” the people of Jammu and Kashmir one after the other.

“Rather than pursue a peaceful resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir issue involving millions of humans living in the uncertainty of a conflict as per their will and to ensure peace in the region, all attempts are being made to undermine that possibility by the Government of India and instead, a policy of permanent demographic change is aggressively being pushed – to snatch our land, destroy our identity and turn us into a minority in our own land,” the Hurriyat Conference said in a statement.

It added that the people of Jammu and Kashmir completely reject and strongly criticise the “appalling imperial measures”.

Several amendments to land laws for the Union Territory has also sparked Opposition criticism about a steady erosion of the rights of Kashmiri people since the special status granted to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 and Article 35A was revoked last year.

National Conference leader and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Thursday criticised the Centre for not allowing political parties in the region to stage protests against the new land laws. Abdullah asked the Centre if it wanted the political parties in Kashmir to quit mainstream politics.

Peoples Democratic Party members were detained on Thursday for their rally against the land laws.

Khan made the announcement while addressing a gathering in Gilgit to mark the so-called “independence day” of Gilgit-Baltistan. He also attacked the Indian government, accusing it of trying to foment unrest in Pakistan and creating a divide between the Shia and Sunni communities.

“I want to greet the people of Gilgit-Baltistan today because we have decided that Gilgit-Baltistan will be given provisional provincial status, which was their demand for long,” Khan said, speaking in Urdu.

“We have made this decision while keeping in mind the UN Security Council resolutions. We made the decision in between the UN Security Council resolutions But I know this was a long-standing demand of the youth here and I greet them today,” he said.

He did not give further details or say when Gilgit-Baltistan would become Pakistan’s fifth province. Khan also said his government had a development package in mind for the region but that he couldn’t announce details because of the elections to be held on November 15.

Khan highlighted the importance of a strong military for Pakistan in the face of what he described as a campaign by the Indian government to foment unrest across Pakistan and to create a split between the Sunni majority and Shia minority. He also said it was necessary for Pakistan to have a strong military in view of the oppression of the Kashmiri people by the Indian government following the scrapping of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status on August 5 last year.

He also accused the Indian government of oppressing the country’s Muslims through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

He praised Pakistan’s intelligence agencies for foiling what he said were India’s moves to create unrest at a time when opposition parties were making plans to discredit the military and judiciary. Khan particularly defended army chief Gen Qamar Bajwa and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt Gen Faiz Hameed from attacks by the opposition parties.

Referring to PML-N leader Ayaz Sadiq’s remarks that Indian Air Force pilot Abhinandan Varthaman, shot down in a dogfight during the military standoff triggered by the Pulwama terror attack in February 2019, was freed by Pakistan because of fears of an impending attack by India, Khan said the opposition leaders were “speaking like [Indian Prime Minister] Narendra Modi”.

There was no immediate response to Khan’s remarks from Indian officials.

When reports first emerged in September of Pakistan’s plans to make Gilgit-Baltistan that country’s fifth province, India had said such an action would have “no legal basis whatsoever” as the region had been militarily occupied.

The Pakistan government plans to make the region a full-fledged province with constitutional rights such as representation in both houses of Parliament. The move reportedly has the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party is banking on the move to boost its chances in the elections.

“Any action by Pakistan to alter the status of the militarily occupied so-called ‘Gilgit-Baltistan’ has no legal basis whatsoever and is totally void ab-initio,” external affairs ministry spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said in September.

The Pakistan government’s move comes two years after powers of the Islamabad-controlled council for Gilgit-Baltistan were transferred to a local assembly. In 2009, the Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment and Self-Governance Order renamed the Northern Areas as Gilgit-Baltistan and the region was given province-like status but without representation in Parliament.